And on the other hand, there’s a subset of people who understand that when SCOTUS restores fundamental rights as they should be, they follow right along, like they should.
\nNow, I don’t advise cheating Uncle, or driving while intoxicated, but goobermint needs to stop with restricting rights by any piddly means it can devise.<\/p>\n
Judge Nixes Lifetime Gun Ban for Non-Violent Misdemeanor Offense<\/a><\/p>\n In a case very reminiscent of\u00a0Range v. Garland,\u00a0<\/em>in which the Third Circuit Court of Appeals\u00a0ruled<\/a> that Bryan Range\u2019s conviction for lying about his income on a food stamp application decades ago should not have resulted in a lifetime prohibition on keeping or bearing arms, a federal judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that a man\u2019s 2005 DUI arrest and conviction on misdemeanor charges cannot disqualify him from exercising his Second Amendment rights.<\/p>\n Though Edward Williams was convicted of a misdemeanor offense, it was also a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Williams didn\u2019t serve any time behind bars, however. Instead, he was sentenced to 90 days of house arrest and ordered to receive treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. Since the\u00a0potential\u00a0<\/em>sentence was more than a year in prison, however, the misdemeanor conviction meant that Williams was considered a prohibited person going forward, and he was no longer allowed to possess or purchase a firearm.<\/p>\n Williams first tried challenging the statute in question back in 2017 and was denied, but applied for a re-hearing after the Supreme Court issued its decision in\u00a0Bruen\u00a0<\/em>last year. This time around, in a case argued by 2A attorney Joshua Prince and supported by the Firearms Policy Coalition,\u00a0 U.S. District Judge John M. Younge applied the Court\u2019s text, history, and tradition test to the\u00a0Williams<\/em>\u00a0case, as well as the Third Circuit\u2019s decision in\u00a0Range v. Garland<\/em>, and found that Williams cannot be denied access to his right to keep and bear arms as a result of a non-violent misdemeanor conviction, even if it was punishable by years behind bars.<\/p>\n The Government has not met its burden in proving that the prohibition on Plaintiff\u2019s possession of a firearm due to his DUI conviction is consistent with historical firearms regulations.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Finding a historical tradition of similar firearms regulations \u201crequires that the government identify a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n A modern regulation that would not have been contemplated during the Founding Era can be found relevantly similar to then-existing regulations by considering \u201chow and why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen\u2019s right to armed self-defense. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n That federal law has, over the past century, allowed for the disarmament of certain types of convicted criminals does not satisfy the constitutional issues raised by applying Section 922(g)(1) to all convictions punishable by more than a year of imprisonment. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Instead, the Court must consider more longstanding limitations on firearm possession to \u201cdemarcat[e] the scope of [the] constitutional right.\u201d <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The historical firearms regulations provided by the Government are not sufficiently analogous to the case considered here to satisfy its burden.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Younge noted that while he remains \u201cquite concerned about the prospect of granting access to firearms to persons who have demonstrably abused alcohol\u201d, he remains unconvinced that \u201cthe general dangerousness of drunk driving and of combining firearm use and alcohol consumption establishes that DUIs must therefore be considered sufficiently analogous to historical examples of \u2018dangerous\u2019 conduct that have previously served as grounds for disarmament.\u201d<\/p>\n Younge acknowledged the government\u2019s citing of laws that prohibited the carrying of firearms\u00a0while\u00a0<\/em>intoxicated, but argued that none of those regulations \u201callude to disarmament lasting beyond the individual\u2019s state of intoxication, and none provided for permanent disarmament, as Section 922(g)(1) does.\u201d<\/p>\n I agree with Younge that drunk driving is a serious concern, and not something that should be easily dismissed, but the fact is that Williams wasn\u2019t barred forevermore from getting behind the wheel of a car because of his misdemeanor conviction. He can obtain a driver\u2019s license and purchase a vehicle despite his DUI conviction that\u2019s now nearly 20 years old, but he can\u2019t legally purchase or possess a firearm. That\u2019s a punishment that doesn\u2019t fit the crime, as far as I\u2019m concerned.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure the DOJ will appeal this case to the Third Circuit, but given their decision in\u00a0Range\u00a0<\/em>it\u2019s unlikely that Merrick Garland is going to get the response he\u2019s looking for from the appellate court. By the time\u00a0Williams v. Garland\u00a0<\/em>gets to SCOTUS the justices will have had a chance to weigh in on Bryan Range\u2019s case, and if the Court does adopt a \u201cdangerousness\u201d standard for depriving individuals of their Second Amendment rights in\u00a0Rahimi<\/em>, then both Range and Williams have an excellent chance of having the lower court decisions in their favor approved by a majority of Supreme Court justices as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And on the other hand, there’s a subset of people who understand that when SCOTUS restores fundamental rights as they should be, they follow right along, like they should. Now, I don’t advise cheating Uncle, or driving while intoxicated, but goobermint needs to stop with restricting rights by any piddly means it can devise. Judge … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courts","category-rights","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97771"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97774,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97771\/revisions\/97774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}